The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (182 page)

Barrington-Ward told a friend that Nazi outrages were “largely the reflex of the external persecution to which Germans have been subjected since the war.” Englishmen’s commitment to fair play, he added, obligated them to help the victimized country “escape from encirclement” and achieve “equality,” the code phrase which meant rearmament. History has credited the Nazis for the restoration of the Reich’s military might, but some Englishmen had anticipated them. In the summer of 1932, Franz von Papen, then chancellor, declared that the shackles of Versailles were “
unerträglich
” (“intolerable”).
The Times
—which the Germans believed was the voice of the government—weighed the chancellor’s complaint, found it justifiable, and called for “the timely redress of grievances.”
⁵⁷

Once Hitler had been sworn in and his
Strassenkämpfer
began unsheathing their long knives, the British government took the remarkable position that the detailed reports from two of its most eminent ambassadors, describing conditions in the Third Reich, were based on misunderstandings, distortions, and unconfirmed rumors. Speaking in Newcastle, Lord Lothian said that the Germans “have passed through a tribulation which we have never known. We should receive in no niggardly spirit the offers”—they were, of course, demands—“made to the world by Herr Hitler.”
⁵⁸

The prime minister agreed. According to one Wilhelmstrasse document which came into British hands when Berlin fell in May 1945, MacDonald assured Germany’s ambassador to Britain, Leopold von Hösch, that he knew there were no atrocities, no beatings, no desecration of synagogues—that everything England’s own envoys had reported, was, in short, a lie. MacDonald explained that he understood “very well the character of, and the circumstances attending, a revolution.” According to
The Times
, Baldwin told Hösch that England was “entirely willing to work closely… with a Germany under the new order”—“
die Neuordnung
.” It is startling to read this Nazi phrase, so freighted with evil, quoted by a once and future prime minister in the columns of
The Times
. Doubtless Baldwin had not grasped its implications. But he should have. And he should have spoken out. His silence, his refusal to see, hear, and speak no evil of the Nazi chancellor was characteristic of the response among England’s ruling classes. If they offended him, they told one another, he would become hostile, and his hostility would blind him to reason.
⁵⁹

Vernon Bartlett thought his countrymen altogether too smug about democracy. Although it “suits us,” he wrote, it “may not suit other people.” Even Bartlett could not defend the imprisonment of Jews who had committed no crime and of former Reichstag critics of National Socialism. But, he wrote, “the Government now proposes to get rid of the concentration camp [
sic
] without much delay.” Sir Thomas Moore, a respectable MP with a distinguished university career behind him, was another early admirer of Hitler. He joined the Anglo-Germany Fellowship and spent half his time in Germany, where, he reported, he had been unable to find any trace of the abuses Rumbold and Phipps described. After the Nazi chancellor had been in power eight months, Moore wrote in the
Sunday Dispatch
, “If I may judge from my personal knowledge of Herr Hitler, peace and justice are the key words of his policy.” The next year he wrote “Give Hitler a Chance,” calling the chancellor, now führer, “absolutely honest and sincere.”
⁶⁰

War between the Germans and Communist Russia was a prospect with twin appeals to Britain’s upper classes, reflecting their pacifism and their fear of bolshevism. But before the two totalitarian giants could meet at a common border, momentous events would be necessary in intervening states: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Rumania, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. The appeasers thought that it would be rather a good thing if Hitler began meddling there. J. L. Garvin, editor of
The Observer
, owned by Lord Astor, wrote that before a “constructive peace” could be established, “a large part of ‘Eastern Europe’ proper should be reconstructed under German leadership.” The extraordinary Lord Lothian, who held no office, sailed to Germany and solemnly informed Hitler that “Britain has no primary interests in Eastern Europe.” This folly was summed up by the Rumanian foreign minister. He said sadly: “Germany has her plans. Do other countries have their plans? If the other powers are without plans, we will be forced to go along with Germany.”
⁶¹

Lords Astor and Lothian were not only forfeiting future allies; they were also overlooking the fact that Britain
did
have interests in the buffer states between Russia and Germany. France was bound by treaty to go to war should any other country invade Czechoslovakia. And Britain was pledged to follow France’s declaration with her own. In November 1933, in the Wilhelmstrasse, Konstantin von Neurath, the Nazi foreign minister, read a minute from Hösch. MacDonald had suggested that Hitler make a state visit to England. Neurath scrawled across the memorandum: “
Unsinn!
”—“Nonsense!” And so it was. Why run such a risk when British aristocrats were already giving what even Hitler hadn’t dared ask for?

C
hurchill was right—the Geneva conference was doomed—but no one in Parliament would congratulate him on his foresight. In those days faith in disarmament was a creed, and to slight it was poor politics. But then, Churchill was a poor politician. Although the most gifted speaker of his age, he was clumsy, even inept, in manipulating the House, the intricate maneuvering of which Baldwin was master. Neither, in the opinion of prominent Labour leader Clement Attlee, was he a great parliamentarian, “mainly, of course, because he was too impatient to master the procedures.” He was also capable of appalling political misjudgments. By resigning from Baldwin’s shadow cabinet in 1931 over the India issue, thereby repeating his father’s aristocratic disdain for consequences, he assured his exclusion from every prewar ministry and made the eventual designation of Neville Chamberlain as prime minister—with all that entailed—inevitable.

But no British politician in this century has matched Winston’s skill in keeping himself in the public eye. In 1899, when Winston was still in his mid-twenties, G. W. Steevens, the great Victorian journalist, met him on the boat home from India and wrote in the
Daily Mail
that Churchill might become, among other things, “the founder of a great advertising business.” Certainly he was a matchless self-advertiser. Even as a backbencher, he made news by his dramatic presence in the House of Commons, by his soaring speeches, by parliamentary tricks which just skirted the borderline of propriety, and by his way of digging into a pocket, producing classified documents, and reading selected passages aloud, with all the gaudy panache he alone could display, to an astonished House, press gallery, and public.
⁶²

Now and then he would enter the chamber carrying a prop. If he had nothing else, at crucial moments he would produce his watch and play with it. Parliament was aware of his diversions, sometimes amused, often annoyed. Yet everything he did was just within the rules. Once, when an Opposition speaker had the floor, Winston lowered his great head and began to swing it back and forth in widening arcs. Backbenchers grinned and then chuckled. The victim said icily: “I see the Right Hon[orable] Gentleman shaking his head. I wish to remind him that I am only stating my own opinion.” “And I,” said Churchill, “am only shaking my own head.” Another time, when an MP was approaching the end of a very long address and was drawing breath, pausing before his peroration, Churchill destroyed it by growling, “Rubbish.” Anticipating an attack on an argument he himself had presented at the last session, he entered the chamber sucking a jujube—a lozenge—and pocketed it as he sat down. His opponent had just begun to pick up momentum when Winston began searching his jacket, vest, and trousers. At first he was surreptitious, as though anxious not to distract the listening MPs, but gradually one MP after another noticed that he was digging into his pockets, ever harder, ever more frantically. Laughter began, and the speaker, trembling with justifiable rage, asked: “Winston, what are you
doing
?” Churchill said meekly, “I am looking for my jujube.”

The speaker’s colleagues raised indignant shouts, but when they quieted down he reminded them that he always enjoyed a noisy House and told them why: “Honorable Members opposite will give me credit for not being afraid of interruptions and noise. It even would be much easier to be shouted down continually or booed down, because I have not the slightest doubt that I could obtain publicity for any remarks I wish to make, even if they are not audible in the House.” He did not add, though they knew it, that he could also make money doing it, selling his text in Fleet Street at a handsome price. And if his tactics offended MPs on both sides of the well, he could always win back their hearts. The House of Commons is no less susceptible to flattery than each of its members, and when he digressed for a moment to recall a critical issue in the recent past, concluding, “All through these convulsions the House of Commons stood unshaken and unafraid,” they felt, as Lord Chandos puts it, “that they had been in a battle and had just been decorated.”

Splendid prose, wrote Hazlitt, should be accompanied by vehemence and gesture, a dramatic tone, flashing eyes, and “conscious attitude”—a precise description of Churchillian delivery. A consummate performer, he would rise, when recognized by the Speaker, with two pairs of glasses in his waistcoat. Perching the long-range pair on the end of his nose at such an angle that he could read his notes while giving the impression that he was looking directly at the House, he gave every appearance of speaking extemporaneously. If the occasion called for quoting a document, he produced his second pair and altered his voice and manner so effectively that even those who knew better believed that everything he said when
not
quoting was spontaneous.

As a youthful MP he had excelled at the set piece but faltered in the give-and-take of debate; Arthur Balfour, prime minister from 1902 to 1905, had chided him, calling his “artillery” impressive “but not very mobile.” It was mobile now, and frequently sardonic. “It is wonderful how well men can keep secrets they have not been told,” he said, and, “Too often the strong, silent man is silent because he has nothing to say,” and, describing Lloyd George’s criticism of his hostility toward Nazi Germany, “It revealed a certain vein of amiable malice.” Sir Samuel Hoare, a coalition minister, was a favorite target. Winston said of him: “He never resents the resentment of those to whom he has been rude.” But the coalition government must be allowed its day: “Where there is a great deal of free speech there is always a certain amount of foolish speech.”
⁶³

Although this was said in a bantering tone, it reflected Churchill’s absolute faith in democracy. If the electorate preferred to be governed by fools, they should be. Of course, that did not make folly wisdom. He did not share the view that sagacity lies in the masses, and in thwarted moments he would quote Hazlitt: “There is not a more mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiful, selfish, spiteful, envious, ungrateful animal than the Public. It is the greatest of cowards, for it is afraid of itself.” The man of honor remained true to himself, even though drawn through the streets in a tumbril. He scorned opinion polls: “It is not a good thing always to be feeling your pulse and taking your temperature. Although one has to do it sometimes, you do not want to make a habit of it. I have heard it said that a Government should keep its ear to the ground, but they should also remember that this is not a very dignified attitude.” He was often called irrational and cheerfully admitted it. So, he replied, was politics; so was human experience. It did not, he observed, “unfold like an arithmetical calculation on the principle that two and two make four. Sometimes in life they make five, or minus three, and sometimes the blackboard topples down in the middle of the sum and leaves the class in disorder and the pedagogue with a black eye. The element of the unexpected and the unforeseeable is what gives some of its relish to life, and saves us from falling into the mechanic thraldom of the logicians.”
⁶⁴

Churchill was celebrated as a polemicist, but many of his flashing moments in the House were sheer fun. Rising to pay tribute to a fellow member on his golden wedding anniversary, Winston touched off a parliamentary cachinnation by beginning: “I rise to commit an irregularity. The intervention I make is without precedent, and the reason for that intervention is also without precedent, and the fact that the reason for my intervention is without precedent is the reason why I must ask for a precedent for my intervention.” One of his baiters was Edith Summerskill, a feminist MP. Every time he said “man” during one of his addresses she interjected “or woman.” After several such interruptions he paused, turned to her, and said: “It is always the grammarian’s answer that man embraces woman, unless otherwise stated in the text.” A rash new member called his thrusts slanders. Winston replied: “He spoke without a note and almost without a point.” And after crossing foils several times with a Welsh Labour member and anticipating another demand from him to which his only response could be an unqualified negative, he had “Nothing doing” translated into Welsh and memorized it. The entire House was stunned when the Welshman, having made his claim, sat down and Churchill rose to growl: “
Dym a grbl
.”